Bursar’s Review Summer 2021 Sample

7 @the_isba Summer 2021 News Building a private/state school partnership upon shared values and the power of technology A Midlands multi-academy trust and 465-year-old Repton School have been shortlisted for the TES State-Independent Partnership award, having created a unique and innovative technology partnership. At a time of great national upheaval, not least in education, stories of mutual support and innovation like this help to offer hope, optimism and perhaps even a blueprint for future state-independent educational partnerships. Repton School is the first customer for Our Learning Cloud (OLC). OLC was set up by the new commercial IT arm of the Greenwood Academies Trust, which operates 36 schools in some of the most deprived parts of the UK, and all the profits from OLC are ploughed back into the Trust to reinvest in state education. At the most unlikely of times to choose to replace an IT system, OLC re-networked Repton’s two rural campuses, built infrastructure, hardware, software and integrations, trained more than 400 staff in the use of the new system, reinventing the whole architecture of IT at the school at the height of the pandemic and Christmas shutdown. Future-proof, flexible and scalable The motivation for this plan was very strong – Greenwood had created a Microsoft-driven, cloud-based system for their 36 academies and saw the commercial opportunity of their cloud solution. In some cases, this had driven such significant improvement in learning outcomes that academies made rapid moves out of special measures and became showcases for the use of educational technology, specifically via the Microsoft Showcase Schools programme. Repton meanwhile had a new senior management team with experience of IT transformation and were hunting for something future-proof, flexible and scalable to build on the major impact remote learning had had on their pupils – a 94 percent approval rating in summer 2020 and with plans to amplify that impact in the classroom in the 2021 academic year. Positive pupil experience This atmosphere of reinvention, fuelled by confidence in the stability of the system, has been reflected in the pupils’ experience of Remote Learning 2.0. Repton exceeded pupil satisfaction and their sense of wellbeing, with 97 percent of them reporting a positive experience and 96 percent saying that they were not unduly worried about remote learning (demonstrating a significant change in attitude to the national norm). Greenwood and Repton are now on the same system and the shared experience of using it has cemented a collaborative relationship founded on the same educational values. Repton School is not the only school to have upped the ante considerably in 2020-21. Yet at a moment when technology – and the gap in its provision between state and independent – became more significant than ever, Repton’s partnership with Greenwood Academies Trust is unique. Emma Bateman said: “Many companies can run an effective IT infrastructure and service for the education sector, but as educators themselves, OLC understand the teaching and learning outcomes that the technology is there to drive, and they appreciate the relationships between people, process and technology in a school. Our partnership also means that we’re re-investing into state education rather than improving the revenue stream of a commercial partner, which for me feels like an opportunity to better fulfil our charitable purpose”. To find out more about this project, please contact Emma Bateman at ebateman@repton.org.uk James Wilton,deputy head (admissions and marketing) and Emma Bateman,chief operating officer